South Jersey Museum Gets Actor/Playwright’s Holocaust Artifact

(Jake Ehrenreich, in a performance of his autobiographical play, "A Jew Grows in Brooklyn.")

CHERRY HILL, NJ (CBS) — The creator and star of “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn,” coming to the Kimmel Center beginning tomorrow (Dec. 23rd), is tonight presenting a treasured family heirloom to a South Jersey museum.

They fled the Holocaust only to end up in a Soviet work camp in Siberia and, after the war, a displaced-persons camp, and finally the United States.

Ehrenreich says he connected to that journey unexpectedly.

“I was doing a show for Joseph Papp and I walked into the theatre, the Public Theater in New York, and I saw a plaque that this building was used to house homeless immigrants from the Nazi devastation in Eastern Europe,” Ehrenreich recalls. “The building that I was performing in was the building that my family lived in, with that valise, when they came to this country 40 years earlier.”